Scott and Becky Go East blog

I'm fairly new to blogging but I just read a blog by a couple who bought a pair of new recumbent bikes for cycling around the world. I'm not clear on where this couple lives but apparently they're Canadians intent on touring Europe, the Middle East and eventually other interesting locales. The "Scott and Becky Go East" blog: http://goingeast.ca/ has captured the interest of several prospective recumbent road bike buyers. This couple's decision to buy a pair of HP Velotechnik Streetmachines in favour of our Oracle Omegas is the subject of this post...

I simply have to make a few comments here. The NY dealership apparently wasn't able to fit Becky on either an Omega Tour or Omega City and apparently this was the major reason why this couple writes they bought the other bikes. As a woman myself at only 5'7" I'm not only the owner of this company but was the exclusive Canadian importer for years of the euro bents and proudly I'm the guiding force behind the development of the Oracle Omega project.

More background on this subject: I purchased my own personal Streetmachine in 2003 but immediately found it very difficult to mount and steer the Streetmachine because I'm just not tall enough to really fit that bike. Now I'm a huge fan of HP Velotechnik and honestly I DO consider them to be the ultimate Euro recumbent bike effort. Through my companies "Triketrails" and the former "Oracle Cycle Works" retail storefront I enjoyed representing HP Velotechnik as one of their "Premium Dealers" in Canada for several years. And I certainly sold many, many HP Velotechnik bikes to lots of happy customers.

But at Oracle Cycle Works we embarked on our recumbent touring bike design project almost immediately in 2003. We spent years designing, prototyping and testing our original model the Omega Tour and in 2005 later we also introduced the SWB Omega City.

Both our Omega Tour and Omega City recumbent road bikes offer literally dozens of handlebar adjustment options in order to accommodate the needs of virtually any size and shape of rider. The SWB City version of the Omega is very easy to fit for shorter riders and women too. For optimum demo testing in such a case however, the boom may actually need to be cut allowing shorter riders to really 'settle' into the reclined position. AND our handlebar setup borrowed from mountain bike schema offers unlimited versatility WHEN adjusted to fit the rider.

We need to stress as well, that we offer a factory installed mid pannier rack for the Oracle Omega ($100 upgrade). I'm not certain where Scott and Becky reside, but had they done more research and actually contacted us they might have been surprised to find out that our factory direct prices are lower than the NY dealer by $ hundreds per bike and we offer a couples price package on His & Hers purchases too.

To add insult to injury, I have personally been on the lookout for years for an opportunity to sponsor a cycling team interested in long haul adventure cycling! And for the right opportunity (a Canadian couple - willing to buy a pair of bikes - looking for touring recumbents no less - in order to do extensive adventure cycling? wow) I would have made them one heck of a sweet finanical deal. Oh well...

This post was intended to highlight to folks not only the facts about the adjustablity of the Oracle Omega, but to stress the value of research - that it really does pay to do research when purchasing a recumbent bike. The market for good recumbents is actually very small. There are only a handful of manufacturers and few dealers.

So Scott and Becky not only took their business to the USA, but they purchased a German bike that by their own admission is not as well equipped as ours, and wow did they overpay! Our Oshawa Ontario bike company is yes newer to the recumbent world than HP Velotechnik but our product is finer. And it's a shame that message isn't even being delivered through dealers.